8:41pm Monday 25th January 2010
By Sarah Cosgrove
WEEK two proper for Fat Girl Gets Fit and I can report that, yes, I did actually do some exercise at the weekend, in the form of 30 lengths of my local pool – woo hoo!
Hackney Baths, or Kings Hall Leisure Centre as it has been inexplicably renamed despite everybody in the area still calling it by its old moniker, has a lovely old Victorian pool which some idiot set fire to a few years back, leaving it closed to locals for ages.
It has reopened but with a smoke damaged glass roof so it always looks gloomy inside, even on bright days. I hadn't been there for at least six months and the roof remains unreplaced.
The changing rooms are also in need of an overhaul and are almost always cold and slightly skanky. This is no reflection on the staff, who you see scrubbing the floor with bleach at regular intervals, I think they're just old and I think some of the dirt is ingrained in the tiling because it only ever looks slightly better after one of the workers emerges sweating and breathless from his or her scrubbing ordeal.
Nevertheless Greenwich Leisure Limited (www.gll.org) which runs all the council's leisure centres in Hackney, Barnet and most of London, has seen fit to refurbish the gym and the dry side changing rooms which I thought looked pretty new anyway.
The pool also has terrible showers; they're unisex so you can't get your kit off and have a proper wash, so you come out of the place feeling not entirely clean.
I did used to think it was fine to have a suit-free shower during the pool's weekly women's only night but got berated by a lady wearing a full length dress in the shower once for 'not respecting' myself.
Despite the fact that I felt I had as much right to be naked as she did to be fully clothed I never really felt like doing it again because I didn't like the feeling that I might be offending someone.
Neither did I point out to her that her outfit was far more clingy and revealing when wet than many swimming costumes.
I didn't really think this would help.
Having said that, while I'd love for the place to have an overhaul it would probably also ruin it for me because the pool in Hackney Baths is rarely full, not even on a Saturday afternoon when you'd expect it to be rammed with irritating children jumping in on top of you and local teenagers giving you evils.
I don't feel about swimming like I feel about the gym and am actually technically a good swimmer, thanks to my Mum bringing me to the pool and then lessons from a very early age (thanks Mum).
The fact I'm totally unfit does tend to let me down as a feature of good swimming is usually that you can get more than a couple of lengths without having to stop so you can cling to the side desperately gulping in air like a person who has nearly drowned.
But for the first half a length or so I feel like a dolphin or something shooting through the water – the very image of speedy sleekness.
As a child I adored swimming and pestered my Mum to take me three times a week. Consequently I was usually the best swimmer in my class.
Once I was in the relay team that won a gold medal in an inter-school swimming gala.
But when I entered my teens and the bullying started getting to me I developed a violent aversion to taking all my clothes off and displaying my flab to the world.
I probably wasn't that fat at all in retrospect but it got to the stage where you couldn't have paid me a thousand pounds to walk out of that changing room into that pool wearing my embarrassingly snug swimming costume and run the gauntlet of all the beautiful girls on the way to the water.
Did you ever notice the beautiful girls who hung around pools shouting out insults to fat girls like me and making the cute lads laugh never got wet and always had full make up on?
Presumably they just went to the pool to pull boys, show off their budding bosoms and make people's lives a misery.
I should've pushed them in.
But the thing about swimming is once you get in, you're just as graceful as everyone else because the water buoys you up and also you can pretend that nobody can see your flab because it is hidden under water.
It's a great exercise to do when you're fat because you don't have the worries about all your weight impacting against the floor and possibly damaging your joints during jumpy up and down style exercise.
And best of all - there aren't any mirrors.
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